Is Flanders taking a subtle swipe at George Osborne? In this report about the US committing itself to more Quantitative Easing she entitles the piece ‘Your Flexible Fed’.
Is that meant to subliminally suggest that Osborne’s approach in sticking with Plan A is ‘inflexible’ and wrong?
She suggests that the Fed have decided to do what is necessary to get the economy moving:
‘In effect, the Fed’s policy committee is now saying it truly will “do what it takes” to bring US unemployment down.’
Whereas Osborne isn’t doing what it takes?
But her whole premise seems mistaken as the Fed is anything but ‘flexible’…after all this is in fact the same policy it has been following for years now…printing money…as Mardell points out in his tag team effort on the same subject:
‘They (The Fed) are worried. Their report says they are “concerned that, without further policy accommodation, economic growth might not be strong enough to generate sustained improvement in labour market conditions”.
So they have launched QE3, their third round of quantitative easing.
Conservatives do not like what is happening.’
And all ahead of an election in November ….‘the new promise, in effect, to spend $40bn (£25bn) a month until unemployment gets significantly lower.’
Hmmm…so is he also pushing the ‘stimulate’ for growth policy….and note his use of ‘Conservatives’ which seems to jar somewhat as ‘Republican’ would be the natural first choice of descriptive, surely?
Looks to be a gently gently approach to promoting ‘stimulus’ thinly disguised as ‘reporting’.
Yup. An interesting piece of ‘hang the bankers’ agitprop on Newsnight. Started with some footage of Alistair Darling’s Northern Rock Bank run – with a fake vintage film effect superimposed. (Subliminal brainwashing to make viewers think this was ancient history rather than a mere 5ys ago – Hence rendering Darling blameless for our current predicament). Once again, a panel of lefties all agreeing and blaming the bankers for everything. No one to argue the crash might have had something to do with Gordon Brown’s policy of overheating the economy with low interest rates so he could cane the UK’s credit cards into the red on a giant socialist spending binge.
Gramscian Marxism runs through the BBC like HIV runs through sub-Saharan Africa.
And the question that never gets asked: why was Northern Rock allowed to borrow 11 times value of customer deposits from the money market (not to mention the gung-ho hosing of credit through 120% mortgages)? If anybody thinks the B of E, the FSA and the Treasury were unaware of the risks inherent in the NR ‘business model’ are living in cloud cuckoo land.
Of course, had all this happened under the Tories…
Something to do with their CEO giving money to Labour perhaps?
She may be utterly biased but in this instance ‘your flexible fed’ is probably a reference to ‘your flexible friend’ which I think was the tag line for an Access credit card some years ago – message here if you can’t afford stick it on your credit card
Worse than that was the number of MP’s using the overly extended too easily available credit to create a housing boom which they could exploit, using tax-payer’s money via their own expenses to build massive property portfolios which made many MPs into property millionaires for free, whilst being exempt from capital gains tax!
Where was the motivation to stick to labour’s original 1997 manifesto promise to constrain and stabilise the housing market and avoid boom and bust, when they were becoming millionaires from doing the opposite??? All without them, or the BBC’s army of journalists and preferred economists even having the slightest clue about the imminent and inevitable, banking crash which landed this country in the brown and smelly stuff…
Of course what poor Steph hasn’t realised (because no one has told her while speaking very slowly) is that eventually the markets are going to cotton on to the fact that UK govt borrowing is still increasing and that the UK govt is trying to inflate away that debt. At that point interest rate are going to explode and there are going to have to be some fast real and deep cuts in public spending.
Now the interesting question is will that happen towards the end of this govt or when her ex Red Ed get himself elected. If it is the latter she is in for a shock.
I can answer the second part of your question: ‘Nothing to do with me, guv, it was the Tories what got us into this mess’.
Don’t worry. The BoE will follow the Fed. As will the ECB – again – the BoJ, the PBoC, and the Swiss central bank. By the end of the decade, they will have printed an additional $15t to the $4.5t to date. What could go wrong?
IMHO Steph’s quoted article was pretty unexceptionable. It was bland to the point of boring. However, she missed the opportunity of suggesting that Bernanke’s policy – the Fed is, after all, technically an independent body as is, I understand, the Bank of England – is the first shot in his campaign for reappointment if and when Obama is reelected in November. QE will give a short boost to the markets (if not the economy) which, given luck and a fair wind, will last for the couple of months needed to persuade some voters into (or remain in) the Obama camp. Cynical? Perhaps, but a dose of cynicism about the motives of the great and good of the world never did any harm.
“Two Eds” also nearly missed mentioning the true purpose of this latest round of money printing: to pump the stock market. That’s a no-brainer, and she barely touched on it, practically as an afterthought at the end. Of course the market always rallies when this happens. That doesn’t mean it’s an answer to anything else, and even Flanders knows it – no matter how much she obviously wishes it to be so – which is why she hides behind the “we don’t know yet” act, unlike how she usually notes her approval of this kind of thing. She tries with that “whatever it takes” drivel, but it’s wishful thinking.
As for Mardell, you can’t possibly expect him to say that this is just an election stunt to energize the stock market and give the appearance of activity right before an election. Nor would he say that this is an admission that the previous two years of borrowing and printing haven’t worked. And while he can wonder if Romney will go after the Fed for this, but the Republican nominee said three weeks ago that he wouldn’t reappoint Bernanke. What else does he need to say? Plus, interest rates are going to stay at the pensioner-crushing near-zero level, which one way or the other harms nearly everyone except the 48% of the population on some form of government assistance. All while adding another trillion+ to our debt. Smoke and mirrors, and nobody at the BBC wants to think about what’s behind it.
Obummer has an election to win, so he wants to borrow and spend. I believe the US electorate are more sensible than the communist UK voters, and will vote him out.
Not gonna happen. There are not enough conservatives blind enough to believe that Romney is any different from Obama. (he is not) and a huge number of Tea partiers and Ron Paul conservatives who are so disgusted by how the GOP illegally blocked Paul, that they can never ever vote for Romney and will most likely not vote, vote third party or even vote Obama as a protest. Additionally, Romney and his band of Corporate Conservatives will never be able to get democrats to switch to support the GOP. The team surrounding Romney are perceived, (rightly or wrongly) as so anti-woman, anti-diversity, and fundamentalist Christian and pro war and anti-civil liberty to such an extent that no Democrat will ever switch.
The Irony being that Obama has been even more restrictive on civil rights than even Bush was.
Romney has NO chance in this election as the corporate elite already have chosen him to remain as their anointed puppet for the next four years. He will screw the tax-payers to lavish money at the moneyed elite just as faithfully as Romney, but he has a more acceptable face for international changes in how the “white man” is being removed from global governance.
We are being slowly ethnically cleansed.
Another Paulite reveals an unattractive inside face. “Ethnically cleansed?” Romney is the establishment candidate, yes. But a huge number of Tea Partiers will vote. The corporate elite are turning towards Romney, actually. But he’ll most likely lose because of the media and Hollywood. As I’ve been saying all along, no amount of campaign funds or grassroots activism can match that power. The recent fiasco with the “Romney: bad, condemning unapproved free speech: good” Narrative coming out of nearly every single national media outlet has taken over everything. Even the security guard where I am today – a certain international body which likes to have the most murderous dictators on the Human Rights Council – was making the “Shoot first and ask questions later, like Romney, eh?” jokes this morning.
The media controls the national dialogue, more so than the corporate elite. Mardell has admitted that they’re mostly liberal Leftoids, so there’s no escaping it.